Songwriter Advisor Blog

If you want to be professionally successful at songwriting  you have to prepare yourself for the ultimate career challenge and you must ask yourself these questions; Do I have clear vision of what I want to accomplish as a songwriter? Have I sufficiently developed my talent and am I dedicated?  How far do I want to go?  How much am I willing to sacrifice?

Songwriters can make a great living through many avenues.  You can be successful at songwriting in a variety of ways, and everyone’s definition of success varies.  For example, there are many local performing songwriters who are not only content playing in small clubs, they’re actually making a good living selling their merchandise at their shows and through their web sites.   

Okay, so you’ve prepared yourself by developing your talent, but have you concentrated on your appearance and the professional image you want to convey?  Do you carry yourself respectably when meeting up with music industry people?  Music publishing and record label representatives are always looking for talented people, and once they verify you have talent and that you’re most likely the “real deal,” they try to find out who you are as a person.

The moment you engage in a meeting with a music industry representative you’re being “sized up.” Once you’ve made a favorable, lasting impression with your talent, personality and appearance, they want to really dig deep and find out the one thing equally as important as your talent; how committed you are to being successful for their company’s benefit.  The reality is – no one’s in the music business to lose money, and if you’re trying to get signed to a deal with a successful company you better believe they’re thinking about what’s in it for them!

There are many sacrifices we all make in our daily lives and songwriting, by its very nature, requires sacrificing a bit of your family life because of the amount of time you spend writing songs, improving your craft , performing your songs in public, and pitching your songs to the music industry.  This can take a toll on your personal and family life even if you’re prepared but you can minimize this by communicating realistic goals to your partner and/or family members.  

The bottom line is this:

No matter how you define songwriting success at it applies to you, you will have the best chance  at being successful if you are totally committed to songwriting.  Successful songwriters don’t reach their goals by working on their songwriting “here and there” when they get a chance.  Even if they have a time-consuming day job, they develop routines that enable them to work consistently on their music and they use their time wisely.

This is a fact;  The vast majority of successful songwriters live and breathe songwriting.  

In Part 1 of this series we learned that songwriters can actually train their minds to create ideas and starting points for songs when they least expect it, in hopes of coming up with original, catchy songs when the inspiration strikes!

Without getting too technical (I might confuse myself) I can tell you our minds filter all the stimulation we absorb through our five senses, and if you’re a songwriter, with proper training and knowledge, you can subconsciously harness all that power running through your mind’s filter and eventually allow song ideas to spring into your head! 

“How do I do that?” you ask.   The answer is less complicated than you probably think.  This is what you have to do, step-by-step:

1.  Learn all the songwriting basics necessary to write songs.  Check out this free beginner songwriting guide, this free step-by-step songwriting guide, or consider a more complete but lengthier songwriting guide such as Six Steps to Songwriting Success, Revised Edition (Due out 10-02-2008): The Comprehensive Guide to Writing and Marketing Hit Songswritten by Jason Blume.

The point here is to learn all the necessary songwriting basics so you have strong knowledge of all the sections used in songwriting. These include; intro, verse, prechorus, chorus, bridge, instrumental, raps, and spoken word parts. You need to train yourself to automatically recognize the different sections that make up songs and how they are used. This takes studying songs and actually writing your own songs (although it’s helpful, you don’t even have to know how to play an instrument to learn songwriting basics).

2. Listen to your favorite songs and pick out the most interesting parts such as the song hook, parts of a verse, a certain rap line, etc.  Now, what you’re looking for is a short catchy line that stands out as being the most memorable part of the song.  As mentioned in Part 1, these are also song areas for you to study and analyze: 

1. a great original song title
2. a catchy melody (usually a short musical phrase)
3. an interesting lyric
4. an infectious rhythm
5. a pleasing harmony
6. any other song component

For example, in Leona Lewis’ smash hit single “Bleeding Love” the part that stands out most to me is, “I keep bleeding I keep, keep bleeding love.”  This is a very short phrase that keeps repeating as the song’s hook.  It contains interesting lyrics and a catchy melody, the most common example as it relates to this exercise.  A great original song title is also there to boot!  This short phrase could have definitely been an idea that just popped into a songwriter’s head!  This sort of thing happens all the time to hit songwriters and you can do it, too. 

3.  Once you know all the songwriting basics and you’re able to recognize different parts of songs, the next step is to really dive deep into writing your own original songs.  You may have already started to compose your tunes by now anyway, but I’m talking about continually and consistently trying to write songs.  You will eventually reach that “zone” where song ideas spring out like water from a faucet!  Many pro songwriters swear they become so consumed by songwriting in phases (usually a few weeks) several times a year because the ideas just don’t stop!    

The trick is to know all the songwriting basics, to know what to look for in songs, and to become really active in your songwriting by continually trying to compose songs. 

The more songs you write, the more experience and knowledge you gain, and before you know it, you will reach that “effortless zone” those pro songwriters seem to reach all the time.  For some songwriters, reaching “songwriting mode,” a condition created by yourself whereby you effortlessly come up with great song ideas, can take a few weeks to several months to a few years.  It depends on how hard you really want to work at your songwriting craft.     

 Be patient-with experience and practice, there’s no doubt you will eventually get to a point where great song ideas stream into your head.  Just don’t try to force the ideas into your head-this will create too much stress, and you’ll actually regress instead of progress.  I know-’cause I’ve been there!